Tom Wolfe published in 1979 a classic of new journalism – Today the classic has disappeared, and the new journalism, as necessary as it would have been, is less the classic than the new journalism that is able to examine reality and what is said about it with distance and irony and wildness and appropriately considered criticism – entitled “The Must Have”. What Wolfe did was spend six years reconstructing based on interviews and situations – he put himself in the situation, recreated it using elastic non-fiction, peppered with the rhythm of fiction–, the North American space race. Specifically, it was about how President Eisenhower had turned a handful of test pilots into… “Canned Meat”. Oh, that’s what they called the first astronauts.
Too many burials
It began “What You Have to Have” with a fascinating chapter devoted to the enormous number of funerals that a 25-year-old couple, a test pilot and his wife, had to attend each month. Because Come on Pilots The tests did nothing other than what their name suggested: test. They tried to overcome the sound barrier and get as far away from Earth as possible. They either froze to death, lost consciousness and control of the device, or simply exploded in the attempt. That is, they died, and their companions went to their funeral, and the women lived in fear of the worst, and they were paranoid, and You’ve lost your mind, amidst the deafening noise of these test flights, because of course the houses were right there, on the test site.
Wolfe, always admirably rebellious, laughed at the system – as he always did, fortunately: he was a fierce and funny critic – through this collection of experiments he largely failed – the motto of what he had behind him. the same NASA became: “Ours always fail”– which led to the conquest of space by the United States, which initially seemed to have no recourse against a powerful Soviet Union capable of foreseeing everything. In 1983, a film by Philip Kaufman was released based on the book and titled “Chosen for Glory” (which can now be seen on Filmin), which was also a wonderfully absurd yet historical artifact. But from an incomplete story.
extreme machismo
Martha Ackmann is a journalist. He is 72 years old. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and was once president of the Emily Dickinson International Society. She chaired it because she is an expert in her work. For nearly 20 years, Ackmann taught courses on Dickinson at the poet’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Yes, things like this happen. At least in the United States. Another thing Ackmann did was write the recently published book – here as it was originally published 20 years ago, in 2003 – “Let Astronauts forgotten” (Ediciones Luciérnaga), the part of history that Wolfe left out in his canonical, defiant and desacralizing “What One Must Have.” Because while all these astronauts were being trained, 13 women were also being trained with the same intention.
Officially, the first trip by a woman into space took place in 1963. Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova did it. He left the Soviet Union. Ackmann’s book doesn’t mention it, but it does mention the fact that Americans, knowing that there were no differences in the training of men and women regarding the space race on the other side of the Iron Curtain, wondered why this was in not the case in your case. Jerrie Cobb, one of the pilots at the time Like her male colleagues, she had already broken the sound barrier more than once, She could have told them that she had to wear heels under her protective coveralls for the same reason. Because Machismo was extremeas obviously offensive as it sounds.
And so Ackmann’s book can be read as the flip side or hidden side of Wolfe’s book, adding to the former’s delusions the delusions about the incivility endured by the 13 female pilots chosen to train in the shadow of the men. Pilots who They were never recognized as aspiring astronautsfearing a society that “never imagined that someone who wasn’t a white man could do it.” the desire and ability to fly into space”. A celebration full of details, sometimes frightening and always exciting, reflecting a society into which one can integrate Tom Wolfe’s narrative pirouettewho lived and still lives trapped in her own condition, as a product incapable of thinking for herself, not even in the midst of a war, no matter how great it may be.
